Archive for the 'eBook publishing' Category

I want to publish the Batan City stories as an eBook that people can read on their Kindles or Nooks or whatever. Of course the Batan City stories are all linked together so I have been playing around with how best to make internal hyperlinks (i.e: links to another page in a document) that survive the conversion from Word/LibreOffice Write to .PDF and then to .MOBI. Which can be emailed or uploaded to an eBook reader.

So far I have worked out the following (starting with Word):

intradocument hyperlinks in Word need a bit of setting up

successfully translating the links to a .PDF depends on the way you convert the document

ensuring that the links in the .PDF move correctly to a .MOBI file (that you can read on a Kindle) also depends on the system you use to convert the file.

1) Setting up intradocument hyperlinks in word:
Don’t simply “add hyperlink” (mouse right-click, add hyperlink. This only works properly for external links (to a website for example). You should use Headers and these have to be set up correctly. Basically you have to add a page break above the header that will become the title of the page you want to link to. Doing this manually does not work properly.

Once you have done this you can go through the document and make each page title (or story name in my case) into a Header (I have used “Header 2”). Once this has been done you can go back and select the word you want to be able to click on to jump to the appropriate story. Right-click the word and select “Hyperlink”. In the dialogue box you will see a list of the page headers that you made previously. Save.

Now you can go back to the document and test the link. I do this by changing the view to “Reading layout”.

2) Once you have checked that all the links are working as you want you can move to the next step which is to convert or save the document as a .PDF.

I tried several optoins for this and the only one that seemed to work correctly was to use Word’s on “save as .PDF” option. None of the PDF printers that I have installed on my laptop managed to convert the hyperlinks correctly.

Once you have a .PDF of your document you can convert it to .MOBI. I did this by simply emailing the document to my account.name(a)Kindle.com with the word “Convert” in the subject line. I tried sending the word document as well as the .PDF version but the conversion failed. So stick to using the .PDF. (see hyperlinkpdf_test.pdf attached)

Once you have sent the email you have to wait a few minutes for Amazon to convert the .PDF into .MOBI. You will find it added to your Kindle library. (see hyperlinkpdf_text.mobi not attached but I can email it to you if you want) This should be automatically appear on your Kindle when you next connect to your WiFi.

Let me know if this doesn’t work and I will try and solve the problem.